WRC HD Production System

At the end of 2012, Red Bull Media House bought the rights to the WRC series and selected Swiss Host Broadcast Services (HBS) as the TV production for the 2013 World Rally Championship series. HBS, for its part, chose Finnish FilmWorks as its technical partner, which is responsible for the technical implementation of the production.

Filmworks and TV Tools continued their collaboration and designed the production system and workflow for Red Bull’s needs. In the new system, the production chain was changed from SD to HD. The basis was that all produced material must be secured in real time, throughout the season.

Production runs on DVS’s mirrored SpycerBox disk system. This SSD-based SAN and NAS system is used at all stages of the workflow; from ingestion to material distribution. There are two identical copies of the media, one on each SpycerBox. Mirroring is done in real time, meaning that when the user sees the media, it is already duplicated. For example, if one of the SpycerBoxes is damaged in transit, production is still not at risk. This is DVS’s first mirrored SSD system in the world.

The material is ingested with EVS’s ENG Soft software. EVS IP Director is responsible for production media management. Vendors and producers have access to view and log material with lightweight IP Browse and IP Clip Logger software. Editors receive material selected by editors directly to the editing table with IP Link plugin. The finished edits are exported with Media Exporter plugin directly to the XS video server for playout or to the Xsquare transcoder for distribution. The critical parts of the EVS production system and the entire production network have also been duplicated.